IP Communications

OK, I am going to start off by taking back the headline of this post... There isn't one of anything you need. If you have a sports car, you likely also need an SUV so your kids cramped in the backseat don't end up with deformed legs. If you have an iPhone, you likely also want an Android or Microsoft tablet because there are just some things iOS doesn't do very well.

Flowroute is one of the companies in technology that “gets it” when it comes to APIs. Yes, I know APIs aren’t new… Us developers have been using them and function calls since programming progressed beyond punch cards. It’s for this reason, some underestimate how much is happening in this area of technology. They may not realize just how much opportunity there is in opening up your platform to the world of developers and becoming the hub at the center of a thriving mini-economy you help create and foster.

The company had also sent me this email and it is so powerful, it literally took my breath away.

If you want your company to have a tremendous valuation, make it an integral part of a platform which allows others to benefit financially from effectively selling your products and services. Tens of thousands of resellers promote Microsoft software, hundreds of thousands develop software for iOS, Salesforce has a great partner ecosystem of app builders and so on. There are a few ways of becoming the platform company… From the inside out or the outside in.

In other words, once iPhones got in the hands of millions of people, the apps added value to the platform and by default, Apple, who is on the inside.

IDT Corporation has been a visionary in the VoIP space for almost two decades and I’ve always been impressed with the company’s technology and range of solutions in the SIP trunking and hosted PBX spaces. Recently, they have become very aggressive in the UC space, going after a channel and looking to be the disruptor in the market they helped create in the 1990s.

In an in-person interview, IDT/Net2Phone President Jonah Fink told me he thinks his company will keep people up at night. For example, IDT has had decades to build out its international infrastructure which includes POPs and nodes in five cities in Brazil as well as London, Hong Kong, Chile and Peru. They offer unlimited calling to Mexico and Canada as well as a core hosted PBX/SIP trunking plan which consists of South America, Western Europe and Central America.

Earlier this year, Coriant, shared a study of more than 80 network operators and found the following:

A reported 80 percent of them showed a high interest in using SDN to make their networks better and more capable of handling the demands of a mobile clientele.

Not surprisingly, the company has been doing its best to establish itself

as the go to resource for these operators as they make the shift into these new areas. In fact at MWC16 they introduced the Transcend Packet Controller which Extends SDN control from transport to IP/MPLS Networks. It further enhances multi-layer optimization and improves service performance in IP/MPLS based mobile backhaul and carrier aggregation networks.

One of the most innovative products I’ve seen this year in the UC space is the Sennheiser TeamConnect, a high quality, wireless conferencing solution. Here is the situation: you want to set up a conference call in a room which isn’t wired for conferences. You open a briefcase, take out a few pucks and place them around the table and voila, everyone is immersed in high quality audio.

Speed is everything in business. It just is. It’s better to be quick than right because if you have a culture of speed you can adjust and get it right before the next guy or gal has a chance to even start copying you. Moreover, thanks to the internet, the ability to roll out new ideas as services where the cloud supports infinite scale means we are almost at the point where ideas and reality are directly connected.

This post has been updated on April 15, 2016 at 4:30 pm with feedback from Wes Durow, CMO of Mitel. Also, it turns out we broke the news on the potential of this merger even earlier than thought... December of 2015.

Communicating via quality voice and video conversations is essential for keeping happy employees, partners and customers. Perhaps most importantly, ensuring quality conversations is a big part of your job security. It doesn’t matter if you’re an MSP, VAR, Interconnect, channel or the IT director, it’s your position on the line when things don’t work right.

Fortunately for you and your career, there is Riverbed and their latest version of SteelCentral UCExpert which is designed to help solve your quality problems.

Six years ago I covered Cisco’s Quad, enterprise social network strategy that was a great idea but likely didn’t succeed because it was sold top-down the way Cisco is accustomed to selling things. It turns out social, needs to be bottom up to succeed. In fact just so many things these days seem to be this way. In many ways, Apple is to blame for this trend over the past decade but the web browser also became a bottom up install as workers forced companies into supporting web access.